Curiosity lands successfully, kicks off new era in Mars exploration

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If all continues to go well, Curiosity will soon bring us a wealth of new information about the Martian climate, soil, and geology. The rover landed at approximately 1:30 AM EST and has signaled its successful deployment. Opportunity — the tremendously successful rover that first landed on Mars in 2004 and is still operational — now has functional company on the Red Planet for the first time since 2010.

“Ambitious” is the only way to describe NASA’s latest probe. After the tremendous successes of Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity, NASA built Curiosity to an even more ambitious specification. The rover is the approximate size of a Mini Cooper, weighs about one ton, and uses a radioisotope power system that contains some eleven pounds of plutonium-238.

Landing a spacecraft that large on a planet like Mars isn’t particularly easy, especially when it’s being handled entirely by automated systems. Mars, according to the scientists who worked on the landing system, has just enough of an atmosphere that you have to worry about it, but its density at what we’d call sea level is just 0.6% that of the Earth. That’s too thin for aerobraking, and Curiosity is too heavy for the airbags that were used to deploy Spirit and Opportunity. NASA, therefore, had to develop a completely new approach.

The initial stages of the Mars Science Laboratory’s approach to the planet are familiar enough. The cruise stage and aeroshell separate and the shell fires its thrusters to orient properly towards the landing site and cancel out the cruise stage’s imparted spin. The craft’s 15-foot heat shield is essential here, the counter-thrust generated by the aeroshell’s descent into the Martian atmosphere slows the craft considerably. Once this maneuver is complete, the MSL deploys an enormous parachute to further slow its descent.

The parachute, however, isn’t capable of slowing the MSL to a survivable descent speed. At just under 6000 feet, the MSL jettisons its parachute and fires its own hydrazine rockets. The problem with rockets, however, is that they kick up tremendous amounts of dust when used close to the surface and could easily hurl bits of rock into the rover’s delicate instrumentation. Faced with this problem, NASA invented what it calls the Sky Crane.

When the craft is close to the surface, descent stage releases the rover and lowers it down a 25 foot tether. By deploying Curiosity from this distance, the lander’s engines can continue to brake the craft without creating disruptive dust clouds. The tether drops loose — and Curiosity is free, wheels down, and on the surface. For NASA, a successful touchdown means the job has just begun, and the rover was dispatched with a considerable to-do list, and far more powerful hardware to do it with.

When Spirit and Opportunity reached Mars in 2004, they contained 3MB of hardened EEPROM, 128MB of RAM, and 256MB of flash memory. Curiosity’s Rover Compute Element consists of two identical computer systems with one automatically configured to takeover if the first fails. These newer systems rely on 256K of EEPROM, 256MB of DRAM, and 2GB of flash memory. The CPU is a BAE RAD750 and is based on IBM’s original PowerPC 750 design. The RAD750 is rated at up to 400MIPS; the RAD6000 used by Spirit and Opportunity topped out at 35 MIPS.

It might not look like much compared to modern processors, but building CPUs and RAM capable of surviving years in interstellar space and years more in Mars’ unforgiving atmosphere and climate isn’t easy. Speciality products like the RAD750 are built to engineering tolerances far in excess of anything earthbound CPUs need to survive. The rover is expected to return hundreds of images, including those of its own landing, through multiple antennas. It can communicate with Earth directly for real-time instructions and driving updates, or it can contact the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey spacecraft to beam data back to us via relay.

Unlike Sojourner, Spirit, or Opportunity, Curiosity’s mission is explicitly designed to gather important data prior to a future manned mission to Mars. The rover is capable of monitoring its own internal radiation levels and will measure which types of radiation are most common on Mars in order to facilitate habitat and space suit design. Feedback and photos from the landing system’s successful deployment, meanwhile, will be used to model the types of systems that might work for the eventual manned mission.

Successfully pulling this off is a major victory for NASA. With the space shuttle program now complete, the agency has had little news to report beyond the ongoing research into next-generation launch vehicles. Curiosity’s successful deployment is a great demonstration of human achievement in spaceflight, even as athletes in London set new records of physical achievement here on terra firma.

Science enthusiasts and earthbound planetary explorers should check out NASA’s “Eyes on the Solar System” interactive applet. The project is still in beta, but it maps a number of interesting objects across the solar system including the positions of both Voyager probes, Pioneer 10, and the various moons of each of the planets. Eyes on the Solar System tracked the MSL approach in real-time, as well as offering a “preview” mode that allowed users to artificially accelerate the landing and descent.

This image has reduced grown men at NASA to tears. That’s the rover’s wheel and the Martian horizon — Curiosity is safely on the surface.

Godspeed.

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All the lies about hardware specifications as usual. They claim silly ancient technology. And people don’t realize that this is a covert op military mission. Curiosity has a nuclear engine.. and they are telling the world that its hardware is cheap and outdated with a camera even worse than those on $30 phones?
The sad thing is that the worldwide population trusts these silly lies.

Will Mills

I apologize in advance to everyone else but I must ask.

Why would it be a military mission for one. Two what is the military operation against, and three why would they publisize it so much if its a military mission? Spirit and opportunity were not nearly as covered as this one, they launch stuff in space all the time with out so much as a peep. If they really wanted to do a “military mission” (for what ever reason) they have other ways then using NASA, and they would not publicize it at all.

Well your a idiot. Lets see we have unlocked the secrets of Nuclear Energy before there was even color photography. Nuclear reactors can be made ultra small. Look at subs and ships.

Also Curiosity was sent to Mars using conventional rocketry. Its on board reactor is Nuclear has a manufactured isotope called plutonium 238 and its on board reactor generates about 120 watts of juice. Power is generated via the heat that that reactor gives off and is converted into electricity.

What evidence does your sorry mind have regarding your claims?

devogod

he has no evidence. he’s just a nutjob. it would be silly to put too high of a resolution camera on it. i mean 3G often struggles to stream 1080p (and even 720p) video just to your home from a mile away from an antenna and, and isn’t 1080p something like ~2MP? to send that data all the way back from mars is just stupid. they claim to be sending HD images, so you’re talking only ~2MP at most. most new phones have that as a secondary camera now. pretty impressive if you ask me that they can give us that from MARS. lol.
and yes it has a nuclear engine, a very small one as already previously stated. 120 watts is hardly anything. my laptop has a 150 watt brick. hell, i think my TV draws more than 200 watts. so the whole car sized rover is powered by a power source that can’t even power my TV. what kind of power do you expect it to have for computing? an i7? better even? silly. how much power does it take to move a rover around and send pictures and take data. they’ve been doing similar things on earth since the 90s with old pentiums.
im sick of people who think that EVERYTHING is some sort of conspiracy. yes, the military will probably learn from this project just as they always do, but they will likely take any knowledge they learn and adapt it to more earthly endeavors.

jobewan

To everyone attempting to chloroform the conspiracy theorist in this thread: you have no more real evidence than he/she has. And it might seem to some, less conviction as well.

Modern day governments do indeed have a demonstrable habit of covering up as a matter of course. That can hardly be disputed in a sane and believable manner.

There seem to be some odd bits about the place as well, when it comes to Mars. Upon having found one such oddity in a fairly high resolution photo (the ‘mask’), it seemed that all photos of that area of Mars on the InterWeb went literally fuzzy shortly thereafter. I am not the only one who noticed. Why would that be I wonder?

Conspiracy theorists often have a more highly developed sense of self preservation than sheep or lemmings. Add to that the fact that you’re only paranoid, if ‘they’re’ not really after you.

While I am neither conspiracy theorist nor sheep nor lemming, I can easily recognize that only one of those three have a set of instincts that are more likely to lend to my safety, than not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_recognition_(psychology)
Human beings are a little too good at pattern matching for our own good. The Man in the Moon. The Face on Mars. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_FallacyHere, for example, is Cydonia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(region_of_Mars)

There was no mystery. No cover-up. And since the original image was taken in 1976, I’m amazed at how you could possibly think that “all photos of that area of Mars on the InterWeb went literally fuzzy shortly thereafter.”

Far from being fuzzy, the new orbiters that arrived in the past five years offer some great views of the area. For example:

If you take this one step further into the “See, they’re hiding something!” then you’ve gone from regular Joe to Conspiracy Theorist. Seb will make you a tinfoil hat. :)

jobewan

Yes yes yes, all fine and good. So many assumptions, so little time.

That all particulars regarding any given space exploration endeavor are being reported as they actually are, without modification or obfuscation; as possible as it is unlikely.

There were in matter of fact a variety of claims made during the Web-based rediscovery of the ‘mask’, in the narrow context of the time, as to the lack of availability of photos of the ‘mask’ region of Mars, at the same-ish resolution as the photo(s) that began the discussion. At the time and in that context, that seemed to be an accurate claim. Having owned and operated an ISP in that same narrow band of time, it seemed to me also, to be so. In the time since, a good deal of material has been presented to the otherwise.

That is no mystery or coverup (can you say, “o-rings”) remains to be seen, with neither speculative camp being able to drive a firm stake into the ground.

That denigration of an opposing view seems necessary in order to render it ineffective, suggests weakness in the argument or conviction of the denigrator (or both). The facts should be enough to prove, or disprove. But how readily available are the facts, and in what portion and proportion? I don’t have any cousins or in-laws working the planning sessions for the Mars program; perhaps you do.

More than pattern matching as a problem, humans have the great issue of trumpeting their own narrow perspectives as fact or further, truth, unaware or unwilling to accept that their assertions [and ‘logic’] often lack a certain, clothing aspect (like the emperor). Time generally burns off the chaff, and we are left with one idiocy or another; the assertion of conspiracy, or the ardent refutation of same.

Ultimately I suspect, the story of space and specifically, Mars exploration will end up somewhere closer to the middle.

VirtualMark

I believe the technical term for someone like yourself is an oxygen thief.

jobewan

I suspect the term for someone like yourself is a skin bag. In all the variations available on urban dictionary.com.

Aren’t you clever.

JachinRivers

You’re a dumb shit.

Joel Hruska

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I’m not denigrating your view — just pointing out that you have failed to demonstrate anything.

I mean really. You’re presenting your recollection of events ten years ago based on the rediscovery of a photo that was 26 years old at the time.

NASA explained the face quite adequately as a demonstration of light, shadow, poor photographic resolution, and compression artifacts. The burden is not on the scientific community to somehow further explain this.

If you want to claim that “something else is going on,” that’s fine. But you need to back that up with hard data, not circumstantial daisy-chains.

jobewan

THE WHOLE POINT. is that those like yourself, who are demanding ‘hard data’, have none of their own to bring to the picnic. As a result, you have no leg to stand on either, and are experiencing what amputees call “phantom limb”.

Let. It. Go. It’s ok. We’ll all be fine. Have your opinions. And I shall have mine. Move on. There’s more to life than this thread.

LAST TIME I subscribe to one of these “esoteric” discussions.

Joel Hruska

And that’s where you’re wrong. It’s called a false equivalency.

NASA says: “It’s not a face. Here’s a bunch of other pictures from our satellites. Here’s more angles. Here’s the original. Here’s why it looks like a face. Here’s research into human pattern matching.

Here’s the law of parsimony.

And here, in the other corner, are all the whackjobs, crazies, and loons claiming that ZOMG CONSPIRACY. I’m sorry. The people claiming to have a plausible alternate explanation are the ones who have to justify, from scratch, how such a thing can be plausible. The scientists with the degrees, the evidence, the satellites, and the scientific know-how get to sit at the grown-up table.

This comic deals with the notion that the Moon landing was fake, but it applies just as well to this: http://xkcd.com/1074/

VirtualMark

Yeah the fuzzy photos are a government cover up for the Martians, who are building an attack fleet of flying saucers. They’re going to come to earth and harvest our brains – they won’t have much luck with yours tho.

jobewan

Ah . . a “selective” reader. So was I, before entering grade school.

Joel Hruska

We won’t get into the question of how easy it is to get a high-bandwidth signal to *one* satellite within the amount of time that body is within signal range while orbiting around a much smaller planet and communicating with a relatively low-powered device on the ground. ;)

devogod

Then don’t. They’re streaming only 720p @ 10 fps for a reason. Long distances are a bit trickier than short ones. To stream any higher would require an amount of power that would just be silly to use in that situation. Possible? Sure. Practical? Not even close. Even the still frames they’re sending are 1600×1200. Rather low Res by today’s standards but quite adequate for a look at Mars.

VirtualMark

Yeah you’re spot on – they’ve been telling us its ‘cheap’, only a few billion and many years of hard work. Chump change.

And i suppose they’re sending it there to set up a military base? On a planet with no breathable atmosphere, hardly any sunlight and freezing cold temperatures?

Well thanks for keeping us all in the loop.

Joel Hruska

As Neil deGrasse Tyson noted, Americans spend more on lip balm each year than it cost us to send Curiosity to Mars.

SiFistar1

Why the Fuss Its out there surveying a d-i-s-t-a-n-t [;anet. Military?ould be. Passive ? more likely Unless you expect a space invasion soon? Just enjoy that we are advancing in our technology and may be we will actuall be able to have Space Travel by Humans and Safely! ! May be not Star Trek or Star Wars Travel – – but a beginning.

some_guy_said

I want to commend Sebastian and Joel on two excellent articles on curiosity.

Also, that image at top – That’s not a real picture from the descent imager, is it?

Does anyone have a *good* reason for sending people to Mars? “Good” meaning something more substantial than bragging rights and TV coverage.

The robotic explorers have done a good job and already told us enough to know that Mars is a very inhospitable environment for people. Do we really need to spend about a trillion dollars sending people there just to confirm it?

Before you answer, consider the fact that we could easily send robotic explorers to just about every plant and moon in the solar system for less than the cost of one manned mission to Mars.

A manned mission is a total waste of resources from a scientific perspective. The cost is extremely high while the benefits are extremely low — but it makes for good TV so we’re probably going to try it.

I saw Windows XP on the big NASA screen when it landed.
Windows XP…good enough to land a rover on Mars….good enough for NASA ; )

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